Family Movie Night: The Avengers (with DIY Super Heroes)

Every Saturday we will be sharing with you our ideas for family movie nights. Movie reviews and fun theme night ideas.

Our Super-Cool-Fab Review Team...

Our crack team of expert Movie Reviewers are this week reviewing The Avengers.

[IMDB]

Hands up who likes Super Heroes? OK, well I can usually take them or leave them but my kids LOVE them. So when I spotted The Avengers available with a Get Now (GN) symbol while browsing Fatso this week, I thought I'd give it a go.
Since I am not a major comic book fan either I can't give a geeky exposition on how well the characters and villains were depicted, I can only tell you whether this was a decent watch for a family movie night and whether it held  the kids attention without making the grownups cry tears of boredom. All round? Not bad.
Lots of action and drama and fight scenes; plenty of villains trying to take over the world and heroes attempting against the odds to stop them. The usual stuff. But rather classy in its way. My personal fave hero is IronMan (he's rather snarky and has the coolest flying suit), but I also rather liked the Black Widow a.k.a. Scarlett Johannson. There's nothing sleezy or coquettish about her portrayal, in fact this is a very clean movie. The reason it's PG13 (I'm guessing) is because of the invasion of ugly aliens and all the fighting. Any inuendos certainlyOh and in one scene Black Widow is slapped while under interrogation and I reached for the remote... but not to worry, Scarlett taught those Russian nasties a lesson. She is awesome.

There aren't really any surprises, it's pretty slick and formulaic "good vs. evil"... but I have definitely seen worse.

[Source]

Movie Plot Summary: There's a powerful cube called a Tesseract that everyone is trying to get their hands on, including Thor's estranged half brother Loki (the plotter) and his allies, the Universes' ugliest aliens. Thor is trying to stop Loki, and so is SHIELD, who have called in The Avengers to help find the Tesseract before Loki can use it to take over earth. Quite a lot of time is spent establishing who is mad at whom etc. (The beginning is a little hard to follow if you don't speak ScienceGeek or ComicBook, so you just have to hope that if you keep watching it will all come clear...)
The Avengers are a motley crew of rejects a.k.a. superheroes, comprised of IronMan, the Black Widow, Captain America, Hulk and Hawkeye, with help from out-of-towner, Thor. They have to figure out a way of becoming a team, not just a collection of clever individuals if they have a chance of winning... blah blah blah. You know how it goes. Bad guys lose, good guys win in the end. But still, not bad. And makes for a fun theme night.

RATED [PG13] This isn't one for little kids - it's too complicated; primary age kids will love it though.



Here's what our experts have to say about The Avengers.

Dash. B. Cool: "This is a very cool action movie. It's a four star for me."

Dash scores this movie's "coolness" as: ♥♥♥♥♥

Foxy Fab: "I liked Captain America and also the Black Widow. The Black Widow is flexible and she's got good aim and Captain America saves people. I liked the fighting scene and the action."

Foxy rates this movie's "fabness" as: ♥♥♥♥♥

Super Scrag: "I love it!!! I want to give it ten hearts! I love it because the good guys won. If the bad guys won I would give it two. I like it because it has super heroes."

SuperScrag scores this movie's "super-ness" as: ♥♥♥♥♥

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The Avengers: Super Theme Night Fun

We thought we'd add a bit of extra fun to our movie night by raiding the dressup box and coming up with our own super hero persona.

Let me introduce you to: SuperSoccer (super stinky feet, super strong kick); AquaGirl (can do amazing things with a glass of water); the Amazing SpiderBoy (has "strong webs" and is "really really strong")

And just because the parents have to lead by example we also have Mother Nature (who else?) and Kung Fu Geordie (super skilled at rarking up kids far and wide).

Photo Booth: String up a stripey sheet and snap away
Dinner: Pizza delivered super fast...

What are your favourite family movies? Send me an email or leave me a comment with your suggestions so we can check it out and feature it here.

Have a great Weekend!